How Members Of The Public Helped Hubble Find Thousands Of Asteroids

Asteroids come in all sorts of shapes and sizes, and they can have vastly different orbits around the sun — some having highly elliptical or elongated orbits, and some coming much closer to the sun than others. Around one-third of the asteroid trails identified were already known to scientists as part of a catalog called the International Astronomical Union’s Minor Planet Centre, as the ESA explained on its website.

However, this means that two-thirds of the asteroids were entirely new to astronomers. Most are located in the asteroid belt, which sits between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, where we know many large and small asteroids live. Many of those found in the Hubble data are small and faint and therefore not often studied. Studying asteroids can help astronomers understand more about the early condition of the solar system and how the planets formed.

The next challenge for this project is to try to understand the orbits of these previously unknown asteroids, as well as trying to work out information about their size and rotation. This is hard to do because many of the asteroids were observed so long ago, but not impossible. “As Hubble moves around the Earth, it changes its point of view while observing the asteroid which also moves on its own orbit,” Hubble scientists write. “By knowing the position of Hubble during the observation and measuring the curvature of the streaks, scientists can determine the distances to the asteroids and estimate the shapes of their orbits.”